I’m 37k words into my WIP, and it’s been a wild downhill slalom on the momentum of curiosity, but I can sense the slowdown, the resistance to keep typing.
“Oh, dear boo, bless your heart, has writer’s block seized your throat? Did the muse go find a younger, more handsome novelist? Did your writerly curiosity die?”
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“No, Master, you crooked-nosed porcupine, my curiosity is still intact. And I’m not blocked. The muse is right where she always is. I’m simply lingering in the beauty of the pause after a creative exhale.”
(This is really what it’s like in my head.)
Anyhow, moving on…
My instincts are telling me I need to step back from drafting. I’m not writing On the Road here. As much as I want to be, I’m not the Jackson Pollock of the lit world; I can’t randomly keep throwing word paint onto the canvas forever.
By the way, you know what’s fun about being here right now? I’m sharing a glimpse into my world in real time. In this moment, I don’t know where my story is going, and as I hammer out my thoughts below, I’m hoping to find a morsel of direction.
Let’s establish a few things: I’m shooting to make this novel shorter than my usual 120k. Not that I’m lazy but because I want to see if I can hit closer to 90k and make my words matter more. Emily St. John Mandel is a master at overdelivering power and good sauce without overwriting. Check out her masterpiece Station Eleven; 333 pages and not a wasted word. I’m reading the 2024 Booker Prize winner, Orbital, and it’s a tiny little thing too, basically a novella, but dear Lord, it packs a punch.
We’ll see if I can limit myself, as I get on a roll and it’s tough to halt. Ideally, my midpoint will be around 45k. Once I go back and feather out the details of what I have, I’ll be close to halfway. Which means I need to quickly smack the midpoint in the face (a topic for the future), then take some giant leaps toward the climax.
I can sort of smell the end, like the scent of the ocean when you draw near, but that’s about it. The goal now is to breathe in the mess I’ve made so far, check my heading, recalibrate, then forge ahead with a stronger vision.
(FYI, I’m trying to share my process and brainstorm without totally spoiling the plot and book for you, as I hope you’ll read it one day. Actually, I hope following me along the way will make the read even more enjoyable.)
How do we know when it’s time for a deep breath during the drafting process? What does the resistance feel like?
We write for a while unencumbered, and there’s this wonderful sense that we know what’s happening. Some of it is obvious in the first part of the book. We had a seed of a story, and then there are inevitable consequences, the this happens, then this must happen idea. But a moment will come when you dry up, when your fingers don’t know where to go, when you’re at a crossroads that must be taken seriously. Or else…
Currently, my savage urge to bang my keyboard around has dimmed. Working on my story is feeling more like work than play. You should see my walk of shame up to the office in the morning. But why, boo? Writing is fun! Yes, it’s fun. But also terrifying and agonizing; it can be war sometimes. As the great sage Tamara suggested to me, my office is really a psychological gymnasium disguised as a study.
Here’s what we’re working with:
My work-in-progress is called Salvation Isle, but we’ll see if that sticks. Assuming I don’t lose my mind or get arrested, it should publish in the late summer of 2027. As a reminder, it’s a story about a woman named Cara who’s been plagued by her hidden past. She’s now in her mid-forties, married, a mother of a teenager, living in California, and struggling in all respects: riddled with guilt, bored with marriage and life, running from an ugly past. She might have kept hiding forever, but a fire takes their home and her community, and in the aftermath, she’s forced into a reckoning.
It’s not that I don’t have options with my story; it’s that I have too many and don’t know which to choose.
Fine, sometimes we have to explore with our writing, knowing we’ll be mashing the hell out of the delete key later. We have to test what it would be like to send our protagonist through different scenarios. Perhaps we need to go down a road for a few thousand words to see if the bell rings. But I don’t want to explore every potential option. Well, it could be fun, but my readers won’t ever see another novel of mine. It’ll be an endless choose-your-own-adventure that will never find its way to print. And I, my dear friends, will be looking for a real job. Boo no want real job.
Remember, boo and all of you: it’s not that I’ve lost control and now in a tailspin toward doom. It’s more like I’ve exhaled a chunk of story onto the page, and it’s time to inhale again, before adding more. We’re simply riding our breath as we create.
So here we go, let’s narrow down the choices.
Cara has come alive in my novel. When I first started, I had a sense of her, mainly because I knew she’d screwed up multiple times when she was younger, and I knew she wasn’t happy with her marriage, but I didn’t quite know her like I do now.
With most books, I’ll spend a month getting to know my character before I type even a word of a new manuscript. Not just a simple questionnaire interviewing my character, asking silly questions about their brand of toothpaste. I’ll do whatever it takes to get into the skin of my character, so that I know them as well as I know myself. I’m aware of what decisions they will make, what they’re thinking, who they trust, who they doubt, when they feel hungry, when they’re tired. I will close my eyes and feel myself in their body, the energy of their limbs in mine. I’m method acting at that point, and it’s a lovely place to be from the outset.
But with this book, simply because I wanted to change it up, I’m following my instincts and letting my fingers fly with less coaching. With each bit of dialogue or internal thought, with each revelation of Cara’s past, I get to know her more.
I can now close my eyes and see through hers. You might think I’m joking, but I’m not. I can feel what it’s like to gather her hair in a ponytail. I hurt when she hurts. Yesterday, I was writing a scene where something awful happens, and I was weeping as if I was actually there, suffering in the same way as Cara.
Now that I do have a hold of her—and now that I’ve come to this natural pause in the creation of the story—it’s a nice place to stop and polish my spectacles.
My WIP has somehow evolved from a dual-timeline to a triple- and now quadruple-timeline structure. (That’s right, I’m a moron who loves inflicting pain upon himself.) I have a strong sense of direction with three of the timelines. Not because I’ve outlined, but because they’ve revealed themselves in my imagination. The outcomes are nearly inevitable. But the main timeline, the one in the present, has come to a complete stop. Aside from the salty bouquet, it’s total darkness up ahead.
After their house burns, Cara and her family move from California to an inherited cottage on an island called Salvation Isle in Maine. This is the guts of the story, their arrival as a broken family of three and how the island and their new community will guide them out of the darkness and usher them toward their elevated selves.
At this point, near the middle, I could go anywhere with the plot, so long as they stay on the island. Their fixed location is just about my only guardrail, other than the obvious: I’m probably not going to bring a dragon into the story, or have a ghost appear.
The first step is to write out what’s happened so far. In other words, pantsers, put your pants back on.
One of my favorite features in Scrivener is the corkboard layout, which allows you to create and organize a series of digital index cards. I’ve used it for so many of my past books when I’m outlining. As you can imagine, it’s not unlike using actual index cards and writing scenes on them, then spreading them out on the floor.
Since I’ve been pantsing, the corkboard has been blank, but that’s changed. I went through my ugly first draft and backfilled the outline using the index cards, including any helpful information, such as the date of the scene and a short summary.
A common thread began to reveal itself in the last few weeks, but sketching out the plot delivered the idea to me like a severed head on a stake. Cara’s main flaw is that she keeps running away. All her life, she’s been running away. (Forget that it’s a cliché flaw; they all are.) What I have now is the throughline of the novel. I know what she’s supposed to learn by the end: she has to stop running and finally face her past. For poor Cara, it’s going to require multiple painful and perhaps even catastrophic confessions. And I now know that everything (or almost everything, as I do like to break rules) that happens to her should push her to the giant revelation that it’s time to come clean.
Let’s dream up some scenarios now.
But first: how enjoyable is this? We get to torture Cara and not go to jail! This is the best gig in the world. Not that I don’t like her, but she needs to grow up.
Like any good literary sadist, we must know which torture devices—narrative torture devices? (Bwahahaha!)—to employ. And we do! Whatever it takes to make her stop running. I’m thinking we start with her legs.
Sadly, we’ve run out of time. Let’s spend a week or two (till the next post) thinking of what awful things could happen to Cara and her family during their year on Salvation Isle. Steeple those fingers and pet your bald cat, you evil villain, you.
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